Goodbye, Nauvoo Read online

  Seeing the woman reminded Martha of the little locket Lydia gave her the night before. It lay protected against Martha’s chest, and she touched it just to be sure it was still there. She was glad that Lydia’s locket was so small and could be worn around her neck. She was forced to leave behind most of her larger possessions; if it wasn’t necessary for survival it wouldn’t be loaded into the wagon. Perhaps it was something small, but to Martha the locket was a valuable memento. It was her only keepsake from her cousin.

  “Do you think Lydia is out there amongst those people?” Martha wondered aloud.

  “No. Worthy wouldn’t have allowed it,” Samuel said. He grabbed the jerk lines and with a snap, the team plowed on again, away from the camp and into Iowa. “Lydia or Worthy would have come back across the river if something bad had happened.”

  Defeated, Martha fell silent. She knew Samuel was right, but she still had that lingering thought of, what if? Was Lydia safe wherever she was?

  As if sensing Martha’s anxiety, Samuel turned to her and said, “There’s no point in worrying, Martha. You should be daydreaming of life in Iowa instead.”

  Martha’s face brightened and she smiled up at her husband. “I already have.”

  “And? What do you think it will be like?” Samuel asked.

  “Well, I’ve decided it will be like Nauvoo. Green and pretty. Except without the mobocrats, of course. Our family will all be there. It will be wonderful. But time will tell, I imagine.”

  Martha felt her body relaxing as she thought of the future. She realized that there was a lot to hope for. There was always something to hope for.

  Martha and Samuel followed their company over an icy bluff, and at the top Martha turned to look back one last time at Nauvoo. The outskirts of town were littered with burned homes where mobs had passed through. And then there was the Nauvoo temple, standing steadfast and proud for all to see. For one last time Martha admired the illuminated temple in the distance before it disappeared forever from her vision. “Goodbye, Nauvoo,” she whispered.

  Epilogue

  Grassy, overgrown fields stretched out in front of Martha like an ocean of green as she stood on her new front porch. After being transient for so long, it was comforting to be able to set down roots finally. They had found an abandoned farm to rent south of Council Bluffs and decided to settle there.

  Martha was grateful that they could be self-sufficient on their new land. There were wild berries and fertile soil ripe for a fruit orchard. Samuel could finally start a hog farm. He already had plans to build a smokehouse. It would take some time to tame the neglected farm and fix up the dilapidated farmhouse, but it was home.

  Home! Martha had not had a real home since they left Nauvoo about a year and a half ago. There was that little soddy Samuel had built shortly after arriving in Iowa. The soddy was comfortable enough, and it had provided shelter from the elements while Samuel worked to make enough money to continue on in their journey west. And then there was that little cabin in Winter Quarters, a Latter-day Saint camp outside of Council Bluffs. It was a sturdy dwelling, although drafty. However functional that soddy and cabin were, they did not totally feel like home.

  What Martha loved most about her new farm was that it was close to family. John Dingman and his new wife Elizabeth weren’t too far away in Council Bluffs. Faddy and Annie rented a farm nearby; Faddy had changed his mind about coming to Iowa after being forced out of Nauvoo by gunpoint. Martha’s farm was only an hour’s walk from Lydia and Worthy, a blessing since they were expecting their first child and Martha planned on helping with Lydia’s confinement. Silas lived a few hours north with his new wife Eunice; Margaret had sadly passed away in Winter Quarters a year before from scurvy. It had taken Martha time and patience to find her all of her scattered family. Now that she had, even with her family being farther away than they were in Nauvoo, her new farm felt like home.

  Martha felt relief knowing there were no mobbers here in Iowa, and no threat of having her house burned to rubble. But alas, the Church was not here and there was no temple. One day Martha wanted to join the rest of the Saints in the West. She had heard rumors that a new temple would be built there someday in a place called the Salt Lake Valley. Martha still dreamed of having her family sealed together for time and eternity inside a house of the Lord.

  For now, they would stay in Iowa. Martha had agreed with Samuel that they would raise their children here while they saved money for the long journey across the plains. They weren’t ready to go west just yet. They didn’t have as much money and resources as they did when they moved from Mountain to Nauvoo. Leaving Nauvoo in February 1846 had depleted what little they did have and they had struggled to make ends meet ever since. How long would it take to be ready to join the rest of the Saints? Martha didn’t know. But as she gazed out at her new farm, imagining ripe fruit trees and brown wheat growing in the fields, Martha knew that the wait wouldn’t be too bad. She would make her life here in Iowa heaven on earth.

  Author’s Note

  Goodbye, Nauvoo was inspired by family history work. In 2009, I first started using the genealogical website Familysearch.org to research who my ancestors were. I came across a biography of my great-great-great grandmother Martha Wilcox and was immediately drawn to her testimony and faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

  I first had the idea to write Martha’s story in 2011, but didn’t formally start writing until late 2014. At the time, I was pregnant with my first child and finishing my last semester at Brigham Young University. Fast forward to 2019, after five years of off and on writing (during which time my husband and I moved four times to four different states, graduated from college and post-graduate studies, joined the military, and had three children), Goodbye, Nauvoo is finally complete. It has taken a lot of research, patience, prayers, and dedication, but I can happily say I am satisfied with the result.

  Goodbye, Nauvoo was originally going to focus on Martha’s story, but as I began researching Martha’s cousin Lydia Dingman and Martha’s mother, Lucy, it became clear that a narrative of their lives needed to be told as well.

  Although this book is based on the lives of real people, it is also a work of fiction. There are completely fictional characters such as Brother Hugh, Fiona, and Brother Fields to name a few. For the characters who are real, I have tried my best to portray them with the limited knowledge that is known about them.

  For some characters such as Martha and Samuel Wilcox, I had a lot of biographical information to work with. For other characters such as Worthy Clark and Daniel Leonard, not much is known biographically besides birth, marriage, and death dates. I have taken much literary license in portraying these characters in my book. For example, I researched the etymology of the last name Leonard and found that it is Irish. For this reason, I described Daniel Leonard as being from Ireland.

  Also, Worthy was about 38 when he and Lydia wed, so I assumed that he most likely had been married previously. No record exists for him having a wife or children before Lydia, although 38 would have been a very late age for a first marriage. This is considering that most people during that time period only lived to be about 40 years of age. For this reason, I imagined there might have been a secret that kept Worthy from marrying or remarrying earlier. This became the basis of the obstacle that Worthy and Lydia had to overcome in their relationship.

  Very little biographical information was available on Lydia Dingman. Her character was built on dates, a headstone, and assumptions. This is what is known: She came to Nauvoo in 1839 with her little brother John and her cousin Martha's family. Her husband Daniel Leonard died February 1845 of lung fever (according to the Nauvoo sexton records) and was buried in the old Nauvoo Burial Grounds. Lydia then married Worthy Henry Clark in January 1846 before the expulsion of the Saints. They had two sons, John and Charles, and settled near John Dingman in Council Bluffs in Pottawattamie county, Iowa. Lydia remained in Iowa while Worthy went on to Utah and became a polygamist. What is most interesting is
that on Lydia's headstone it reads: Lydia Dingman, wife of Daniel Leonard. Obviously her marriage to Worthy did not work out, and her marriage to Daniel, although short, had made a profound impact on her. She never remarried after her failed marriage to Worthy.

  The fact that Lydia and Daniel had been married for two years and no record of children exists for them made me assume they either suffered from infertility, miscarriage, or stillbirth. It was not common during that time period to make a record of an infant who was stillborn or miscarried. Since Lydia went on to mother two children with Worthy Clark, I decided that stillbirth would have been a likely scenario to have occurred.

  Martha Wilcox really was born out of wedlock, the biological daughter of Lucy Parker and Richard Bolton. It is not known when she discovered that Richard was her real father or what kind of relationship she had with him when they lived in Mountain at the same time. One detail that is markedly different in the book than in real life is that in real life, Martha knew about her father in 1844; a church baptismal record shows that she was baptized for Richard Bolton that year. (On a side note, it wasn’t until later that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints revealed that women must only do temple work for women, and men for men.) For the purpose of story-telling, I created the narrative of Lucy’s deathbed confession to her daughter about her biological father.

  There were a few challenges that arose in the execution of my book besides having limited biographical information. While doing family history research for my book, I discovered that Martha and her family commonly reused family names. For instance, Beth's real name is Lucy, like her mother. Likewise, Annie's real name is Asenath, the same as her niece Asenath Wilcox and Aunt Asenath Boyd, both mentioned in Chapter 2. I chose to alter their names to avoid reader confusion.

  Another challenge I encountered was telling the story as historically accurate as possible. This required a lot of research of life in the mid-19th century and specifically life in Nauvoo. I was lucky to find an amazing source of information on these topics in several books by George W. Givens entitled In Old Nauvoo, 500 Little-known Facts about Nauvoo, and 500 Little-known Facts about Church History. Another book that fueled my research is Sacred Stone: The Temple at Nauvoo by Heidi S. Swinton. Additionally, Brigham Young University's Religious Studies Center has a plethora of free, online publications at https://rsc.byu.edu/ that detail church history during the Nauvoo period. These sources, among others, were vital in building a historically accurate Nauvoo narrative.

  For the purpose of story-telling, there were instances where I took some liberties in historical accuracy. To demonstrate, it is not known exactly when the new stone baptismal font was first used in the Nauvoo temple. There are records of it being placed in the temple during the summer, but there are also records of the basement of the temple being used as storage during the summer. In my book, the font would have been used by the characters around September or October.

  Writing and researching church history for Goodbye, Nauvoo has helped me strengthen my personal testimony and faith in Jesus Christ. It has also brought my ancestors to life; no longer are they just names on paper for me. I hope that my book can convince others to learn more about their own family history and to love their family, both living and dead, more fully.

  About the Author

  Marie Woodward was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. As a descendant of Latter-day Saint pioneers, she has always been fascinated by church and family history. Her debut novel, Goodbye, Nauvoo, was inspired by the biography of her great-great-great grandmother, Martha Wilcox, a pioneer woman whose faith brought her and her family to Nauvoo, Illinois, from Canada.